Choosing a Good Title

There's something about a really great title--something compelling that extends beyond the work itself. It's especially powerful when the work so titled is as great as the appellation applied to it--One Hundred Years of Solitude comes to mind, as do several albums from the Beatles' middle period, or any number of French films from the mid-twentieth century (The Grand Illusion, The 400 Blows, Breathless, etc.)

This connection between the power of a title and the power of the work itself can be equal for the lowbrow as for the highbrow. I think of a book we have on the bookshelf in our downstairs bathroom (yes, we have one--a bookshelf in our bathroom, that is) called Dig That Crazy Grave, a 1960s pulp detective novel by Richard S. Prather. Or a book my older brother Jon supposedly brought home when we were kids (I was too young to know about this at the time) allegedly titled Kids Who Love to F____. KISS songs from the classic era often had extremely compelling titles ("God of Thunder," "Shock Me"), and then there's one of my all-time favorite horror film titles: Make Them Die Slowly. (That was the title for U.S. audiences, anyway, where people are less literate; in Europe, it was the much less visceral Cannibal Ferox.

But what if a work doesn't live up to its title? I'll never forget my disappointment when I discovered that I'd already read the best part of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land before I cracked the cover. (And the title itself came from the Bible.) Or The Bridges of Madison County: with that title, I expected to be awed, and I was, well, rather less so. Or the movie Strange Days (in contrast to the Doors album after which it's named, which completely lives up to its title.) Yet if a title of a bad work is entirely original--for instance, Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early the Day I Died--doesn't that count as a form of art in itself? And though the Bridget Fonda movie Point of No Return was laughably horrible, should somebody get kudos for the cool title and poster art?

I don't know; I only know that I have a hard time coming up with titles that don't sound stupid, and I'm always impressed with those people who go out on a limb for something really fresh that ultimately sticks in the mind: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, say, or Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red. I never figured I had that kind of ability, so I've tended to swim a little closer to shore. Mostly I rely on my wife, agent, and muse, who's titled many a book for our clients, and helped me come up with character names, etc.

So when she set me up with a blog and asked me what I wanted to call it, I shrugged and said, "What do you want to call it?" And she came up with this crazy title, which I liked immediately because I took its sheer grandiosity as an inherent form of self-deprecation. Probably won't have much of an epic nature to offer in this little world, but at least I hope it will be entertaining.